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From "Esquire," December 1990
"Terminal Delinquents"
Once, they stole hubcaps and shot out streetlights. Now they're stealing your
social security number and shooting out your credit rating. A layman's guide
to computer highjinks.
By Jack Hitt and Paul Tough
On a muggy Friday night, we putter about the entrance to the Chelsea Hotel
in New York City, nervously chatting about nothing in particular, pacing,
thumping a dead coffee cup, waiting. A massive sun - garishly orange,
unnaturally close - tries to wash this skeezy neighborhood with its maudlin
rays, but this is Manhattan, the Chelsea, where Nancy Spungen asked Sid Vicious
to stab her to death; no way. It moves on, down the runway of Twenty-third
Street to the Hudson River, like all the traffic on this block, unnoticed. We
are here to meet Kool and Ikon (all hacker names have been changed), reputedly
two of the most talented computer hackers this side of Newark. They had agreed
to reveal the secrets of their craft, but only if we chose a place such as the
Chelsea, where our work would be untraceable.
The film-noir tactics are necessary these days because hackers are on the
lam. During the last few months a federal sweep of computer hackers, known as
Operation Sun Devil, has targeted the country's hacker elite. Last spring,
Secret Service agents raided the homes of scores of kids, seizing not only
computers but every piece of electronic equipment in sight, down to answering
machines, cassette recorders, even soldering irons. These searches had all the
subtlety of SWAT raids: six armed agents - guns drawn - to take one teenager
into custody. In one Manhattan bust, a fourteen-year-old boy stepped from the
shower into the sights of an agent's shotgun. In all, the government has
seized twenty-seven thousand computer disks from forty suspected hackers. Two
of them are to meet us tonight.
HACKING, as most of us know it, means breaking into private computer
systems. More broadly, hacking is about solving problems, getting around
obstacles, clearing the way. It involves not only the technical methods of
skirting computer security, but also convincing the people who run the
machines to divulge their passwords. Here at the Chelsea, the obstacle we're
circumventing is the U.S. Secret Service.
Until recently, hacking was done in the comfort of one's bedroom, plugged
into Mom and Dad's home phone. But a government wiretap can do a lot to change
old habits. Now many hackers carry mobile computer rigs that attach to any
phone - whether it's a pay phone on the street or the room phone in a hotel.
According to the media kit issued by the Secret Service, the boys we are
scheduled to meet pose a clear and present danger to the security of both the
government and the American people: "The conceivable criminal violations of
this operation have serious implications for the health and welfare of all
individuals, corporations, and United States government agencies relying on
computers and telephones to communicate." In other words, for the "health and
welfare" of us all.
But when the boys finally arrive and the four of us stand in the lobby of
the Chelsea, chatting, we find that they are courteous, even deferential. It
is difficult to see them as the new Communists, the new menace, the enemy
within. And if it is hard to see them as the government's clich?s, it is
equally difficult to see them as the media's, which has chosen adjectives from
a different page of the thesaurus, depicting hackers either as a group of buck-
toothed dweebs or the lazy sons of the white middle class whose loathing of
their parents is so intense that they wreak their Freudian revenge upon the
aptly named Ma Bell.
The most recent poster boy for computer subversion is Robert Morris Jr., a
former Cornell graduate student convicted earlier this year of releasing a
virus that disabled nearly six thousand computers nationwide. Morris's father
was the head of the National Computer Security Center, the government's
computer-security agency, and the media delighted in painting Morris Jr. as the
spoiled son of privilege ruining his father's good name. The Ivy League
student stared out from a thousand newspaper photos, pale and owl-like in his
glasses. No longer would the government be forced to denounce phantoms;
computer hacking now had a face and a name.
But these boys are teenagers - nearly ten years younger than Morris -
olive-skinned, descended from Mediterranean stock. Home is a working-class
urban neighborhood in New Jersey. They could never consider graduate school
at Cornell; they're thinking about Passaic County Community College.
Though handsome, they possess the awkwardness of youth - they are
seventeen and eighteen years old - so with a little imagination, we could
certainly write them up as geeks. Their clothes are standard issue for peer-
pressured teens: baggy jeans, no belt, low-top sneaks, long-sleeved T-shirt.
No pocket protector, but no hair sculpted into a Dairy Queen offering, either;
just careless teenage hair. They are similar in appearance - medium height
and lanky. Ikon is the shorter of the two and tends to be the more serious.
His jokes are often put-downs, mocking the stupidity of those around him.
Kool's humor is more playful, even lewd; he's constantly checking out the
girls.
Their language is urban, toughened by "dems" and "dozes;" and youthful,
brimming with "uhs," "likes," and "you knows." But take out that oral
punctuation, and the syntax is textbook correct. Their conversations are
surprisingly sophisticated in their understanding not only of the complex
workings of the computer but of the caprices of the human heart as well.
Under false names and paying in cash, we check into our cheap room, a
space just big enough for the four of us, painted white every year for half a
century and furnished with flimsy items stained the color of cocoa. We
quickly redecorate, hauling the desk next to the bed and pulling up the chair
so that we can all sit and see. We set their portable laptop computer on the
desk and string a tangle of wires among the computer, various electronic
gadgets, and the hotel telephone. Ikon's fingers fly across both the phone's
keypad and the computer's keyboard with blinding speed.
Eeeep. We have connected. We are here to learn how to do this, but for
now we just stare into the shimmering green screen. In a matter of minutes we
are deep in the heart of the telephone company's computers. It appears that
Ma Bell has been expecting us; the screen suddenly displays a boxed note,
unambiguous in its meaning:
W A R N I N G
Access to this computer and to the computer data and computer
materials accessible by use of this computer is restricted to those
whose access has been authorized by NYNEX or its subsidiary companies.
Use by unauthorized individuals or use for unauthorized purposes is a
violation of Federal and/or State Laws.
Kool asks Jack for his home telephone number. More light-speed hand movements.
The room is still with concentration, interrupted occasionally by an
incomprehensible chatter of acronyms and a strange, bureaucratic-sounding
shorthand. Suddenly, a series of numeric patterns blooms on the screen. It
looks like this:
M 00 TR01 555 0000
0 0 0 0
LEN 10 121 306
001 000 000 000 000 000 4
000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
"Doesn't mean much to you, does it Jack?" asks Ikon. "This is what a phone
number really looks like. The LEN is your line-equipment number. It's the
actual hardware, the only thing that matters. Your phone number is just
scratch-pad nonsense. I could change it right now, if I wanted to. It could
be anything at all."
More clacking on the keyboard, and a new image appears:
M 01 TR75 1 ID 555 0000 00000002
PIC 222 TTC
Ikon makes a few changes, and the configuration looks like this:
M 12 TR75 1 DN 555 0000 00000003
PIC 288 TWC TTC
Jack has just been granted three-way calling (TWC) and has switched his long-
distance carrier from MCI (222) to AT&T (288). At such profound digital
levels, these changes will escape the NYNEX business office. Consequently,
Jack will never be billed.
This deep into the system, many other things are possible - from the
simple, such as finding an unlisted phone number with an address or a name, to
the sinister, such as monitoring the conversation of anyone we choose by
quietly dropping in on the phone line like an operator, undetected. All of it
is rather simple, they insist, once you understand the structure of the
system. If you're not STUPID (the ultimate hacker put-down), if you apply
common sense to the system, hacking is a piece of cake.
The image of the powerful and reckless hacker, capable of rooting around
in our most-secret computer systems, unleashing crippling computer viruses,
disrupting phone service, crashing hospital computers, and changing school
records, is the one most affirmed by law-enforcement officials and the daily
media. This is not so only because it easily suits the respective purposes of
these institutions - whip up public loathing so the sons of bitches can be
arrested; sell newspapers - but also because it is largely true. This
representation fails, however, because it doesn't answer the most obvious
question: If hackers really have the knowledge to do such things, why haven't
they used it? Why aren't we living in a constant nightmare of paralyzed phone
systems and crashing computer banks? To answer this question, we have spent
the last year getting to know more than a dozen of the best hackers in America.
Over time, we won their trust and were admitted into their ranks. We
apprenticed ourselves to them so that we could learn what damage they really
CAN do and why they don't do it.
Hacking, at its most mechanical, requires that you arrange an electronic
conversation between your humble laptop (Radio Shack, $800) and a huge
computer - brimming with information - inside some corporate headquarters,
government agency, or university. The conversation takes place in a very
human way - using a telephone. The laptop uses a modem (Radio Shack, $150) to
translate the digital pulses of a computer into the hisses and beeps that
travel over regular phone lines.
In the comfort of your home, a modem can be plugged directly into the
back of the telephone. When you're using plugless phones, like hotel phones
and pay phones, one more step is required. An acoustic coupler (Laptop Shop,
$150), tightly strapped to the phone receiver, allows the computer to fire
audio tones directly through the handset, the way we do when we speak.
Just like people, computers have phone numbers, known as "dialups." When
you call a computer, its own modem hears the tones coming through the phone
line and translates your hisses and beeps back into the electronic pulses the
computer can understand. You're connected. The hacking can begin.
There are thousands of systems to hack, and dozens of hackers for each
one. For Kool and Ikon, though, there's only one game in town - the phone
company.
Hacking Ma Bell dates back to the late Sixties, when phone hackers, then
dubbed "phone phreaks," discovered that the entire AT&T phone system could be
controlled by whistling tones at various frequencies directly into a phone.
One notorious hacking pioneer, John Draper, made the farcical discovery that
the toy whistle in a box of Cap'n Crunch perfectly mimicked the 2,600-hertz
tone that engaged a long-distance line, enabling him to make free calls
anywhere in the world. Draper assumed the cereal's name as his "nom de haque,"
and he and his generation spent years deciphering the meanings of different
tones. The perfection of the "blue box" - a portable device that duplicated
the tones needed to master the phone system - became the ultimate mission.
With the advent of long-distance calling cards, which are easily
filchable, hackers today take free long-distance calls for granted. What
interests Captain Crunch's descendants are the computers that control and link
our phones. Soon after the Captain Crunch era, AT&T was broken up into a
network of "baby Bells" (regional phone systems). These are now the main
event. Kool and Ikon hack NYNEX, which handles phone service for all of New
York and New England.
The first stop for your phone line, after it snakes out of your house, is
a local switching center. The "switch" directly controls all the phones in
your neighborhood. A switch performs the same service as Lily Tomlin's cranky
operator, Ernestine, who would plug your phone jack into the line that you
were calling. Today, your switch makes that connection electronically, and
does it for as many as 150,000 phones.
Each neighborhood switch is controlled by its own huge computer; these
computers are the essential targets of the phone-company hacker. If you can
access the computer for a switch, you can control every phone it does. You
can turn those phones on and off, reroute calls, and change numbers.
When this knowledge grows boring, the explorer can investigate the dozens
of NYNEX's more complicated computer systems, each containing hundreds of new
passageways and strange domains. For the advanced hacker, one of the more
attractive is the infelicitously named NYNEX Packet Switched Network, or NPSN.
Its beauty is its strength: The system allows you to enter each of the more
than one thousand switches in New York and New England. Even more appealing,
it allows you to ricochet off onto regional maintenance systems such as COSMOS
and MIZAR. Among its many talents, COSMOS sends out instructions to create
and kill phone numbers. The local MIZAR actually does the work. Since COSMOS
keeps the records and MIZAR doesn't, most hacking done on a MIZAR is
undetectable. MIZARs are a hacker-favorite.
In order to get into any computer, you need a dialup number, an account
name (or "login"), and a password. Most people encounter the basics of this
process every time they approach an automatic-teller machine. Knowing where
to find an ATM is your dialup; placing your card with its black magnetic strip
in the slot is like entering your account; punching in your personal
identification number is like typing your password. The secret of obtaining
these three keys for breaking into a phone-company computer - or any computer -
is simple, our tutor explain, and can be learned as easily over a banana split
in an air-conditioned diner as over a computer screen. We abandon our
sweltering room at the Chelsea and head to the local joint. On the plate-glass
window of the restaurant we notice a decal that boasts, INSIDE: A PUBLIC PHONE
YOU CAN DEPEND ON.
Over burgers and ice cream, we learn that there are several mechanical
ways of learning accounts and passwords, but that there's an easier way, known
as social engineering. Basically, social engineering is bullshitting -
calling someone who has access to a system and convincing them that you are a
legitimate user who needs a dialup number, an account, and a password.
For the adventurer, social engineering may seem like cheating. Getting a
password can be done by purely technical hacking means: programming a computer
to try thousands of passwords. But to these guys (and even to their
apprentices after a few weeks), this method is as irritating as playing the
first levels of a video game after you've mastered them. You want to whiz
right past such tedium to the more interesting levels. Getting a password is
not hacking. It is a pain in the ass.
Social-engineering a used-car dealer is easy, even if you don't know what
you're doing (because he doesn't either - although his natural suspicion as a
civilian often means you don't get past the hellos). Social-engineering a
computer specialist with high-level access is easy only if you do know what
you're doing. The professional needs to hear a few bits of jargon, just enough
artfully expressed codes to make him feel that he is talking to a member of the
guild. Both forms are surprisingly successful.
"Sometimes," says Kool, "it's so simple. I used to have contests with my
friends to see how few words we could use to get a password. Once I called up
and said, `Hi, I'm from the social-engineering center and I need your
password,' and they gave it to me! I swear, sometimes I think I could call up
and say, `Hi, I'm eating a banana split. Give me your password.'"
Like its mechanical counterpart, social engineering is half business and half
pleasure. It is a social game that allows the accomplished hacker to show off
his knowledge of systems, his mastery of jargon, and especially his ability to
manipulate people. It not only allows the hacker to get information; it also
has the comic attractions of the old-fashioned prank call - fooling an adult,
improvisation, cruelty.
In the months we spent with the hackers, the best performance in a social-
engineering role was by a hacker named Oddjob. With him and three other guys
we pulled a hacking all-nighter in the financial district, visiting pay phones
in the hallway of the World Trade Center, outside the bathrooms of the Vista
Hotel, and in the lobby of the international headquarters of American Express.
Oddjob's magnum opus takes place along the south wall of the phone bank
leading to the Vista's bathrooms. We bolshevize six chairs from the women's
powder room and attach our computer to a pay phone. Throughout the night, the
hackers compliment one another on the sheer genius of the place: chairs, a
snack bar down the hall, and - on a nasty, humid city night - air conditioning.
At the rarefied level these four have reached, an evening's work often
revolves around the links between networks in the NYNEX system. On this night,
one of our links is down; a password has been changed. Oddjob begs for a
chance to social engineer something, anything. His method, he explains, is to
sound like a regular person, to assume the accents of those who do the day-to-
day keypunching and processing - the heavy lifting of the information age. He
has a considerable repertoire - Brooklyn guy, polite blue-collar type, southern
redneck. "You should hear my black woman," he boasts. Tonight's composition
will be performed in the key of Flatbush.
Oddjob paces furiously on his lilliputian stage, tethered to the pay phone
by the irritatingly short steel line, firing suggestions to the crowd on whom
to call, taking in ideas. Part of the thrill of social engineering is clearly
the improvisation of it all. But it's improvisation with a competitive edge.
You show your machismo by waiting until the last possible second to prepare
yourself. The moment after dialing, before the phone is answered, a true
hacker will suddenly request vital information. "Where should I say I'm
calling from?" "Who do I ask for?" or even "Where am I calling?" Oddjob is
feigning such recklessness when the phone is answered. He opens by
establishing his credentials in thick Brooklynese:
"Yeah, hoi deh. Dis is Tucker calling from Pearl Street operations.
Yeah, hi. You guys havin' trouble gettin' into the NPSN deh? You guys are
goin' through a packet switch, right? Yeah, when you go into COSMOS. Okay,
'cause dat's where the problems are - ya da guy reported it. Okay, what do you
use for the packet switch when you first connect - do you have your own code?"
She does have her own code; unfortunately, she is not about to give it to
him. She tells him to solve his problem by checking the manual. So Oddjob
loudly flips through the pages of a nearby phone book, pretending to read from
its pages, and finally, frustrated, heaves the phone book toward the wall,
with a crash. But it's done in a way that says: "Geez, aren't these manuals
frustrating? We, the folks who do all the work, are supposed to make sense of
these?" She's beginning to cotton to him and reveals that the first part of
the code is the user's initials. Oddjob cranks up the charm and moves in for
the kill.
"Okay, so what do you put in? GWT? Are those your initials? What's your
name? Gail? That's a nice name. Mine? Tucker. Yeah, that's my last name.
I don't like my first name because it sounds really dumb. No, I'm not telling.
Noooooooo. I'm not gonna tell you. Ooooooh. You really want to know? Okay,
it's...Edmonton. Oh, come on, Edmonton is NOT distinguished, it's silly. They
used to kid me in school. Yeah. Heh, heh. Anyway, just so I can get to the
right system, would you walk me through it?" She does, and he gets most of the
information he wants.
By 4:00 A.M. we had been thrown out of the Vista and were spread out across the
waxy, marble lobby of American Express headquarters, listening to Oddjob con
another sucker on the phone. Kool was trying a few breakdancing moves. The
evening had been devoted almost exclusively to social engineering; we hardly
used the laptop at all.
As the edge of the horizon began to lighten and the two of us had said
goodnight to the hackers and were walking home, we realized that the entire
evening had provoked an eerie d?j? vu. As teenagers, we had both survived many
of these Friday nights; trying halfheartedly to get into trouble, sitting
around with the guys, waiting for something to happen. It's no accident that
there are no hackers older than about twenty-one; serious hacking requires the
kind of tireless devotion that only teenagers possess.
As with all teenage pursuits, hacking doesn't last forever. For most
hackers, manipulating technology in imaginative ways is nothing more than
rebellion. They learn high-tech pranks, such as changing the outgoing message
on their algebra teacher's home answering machine, or they figure out how to
chat with other hackers around the country for free. But these amateurs lack
the patience and resolve to ascend to the levels our companions have attained.
They fool around for six months or a year, get bored, and quit.
Like any group of teenagers with a common pursuit, serious hackers have
nothing but contempt for amateurs. And when a fellow pro moves on, they treat
it almost as betrayal, scorning the traitor as having "faded away into
society." They can't imagine it happening to them.
Hackers are a group that has always existed in teenage society. They are
not the genius nerds seen on T.V. Nerds, by definition, are prosaic. They
lack the creativity, the badass guts needed to hack. Nerds, in fact, are the
ones who grow up and GET hacked. Real hackers are the rebellious brains: the
video-game addicts, the crystal-radio connoisseurs, the Dungeons & Dragons
freaks. They are the guys who understand, even love, the way systems work:
They don't just take things apart and put them back together - they make them
do something else, something BETTER.
Where we see only a machine's function, they see its potential. This is,
of course, the noble and essential trait of the inventor. But hackers warp it
with teenage anarchic creativity: Edison with attitude.
Consider the fax machine. We look at it; we see a document-delivery
device. One hacker we met, Kaos, looked at the same machine and immediately
saw the Black Loop of Death. Here's how it works: Photocopy your middle finger
displaying the international sign of obscene derision. Make two more copies.
Tape these three pages together. Choose a target fax machine. Wait until
nighttime, when you know it will be unattended, and dial it up. Begin to feed
your long document into your fax machine. When the first page begins to emerge
below, tape it to the end of the last page. Ecce. This three-page loop will
continuously feed your image all night long. In the morning, your victim will
find an empty fax machine, surrounded by two thousand copies of your finger,
flipping the bird.
Ikon and Kool have been hacking the NYNEX phone system for about six
years. Although much of their work has been done alone, they have each been in
dozens of informal partnerships and groups, which tend to form quickly and
dissolve just as fast. In the early Eighties, some of the best hackers in the
country formed the Legion of Doom, which, despite its wicked name, basically
served as a conduit for information. The quest to understand NYNEX is a far-
flung, collective enterprise, like the space program, only run by teenagers -
experiments aren't done in scrubbed laboratories but in hotel lobbies;
information isn't exchanged at symposia in Geneva but at hastily called
meetings in peculiar locations. One such meeting has been institutionalized:
first Friday of every month, Manhattan Citicorp building at Fifty-third and
Lexington at - where else? - the pay phones.
Although the channels hackers use to communicate are highly sophisticated,
the way information travels is similar to the way knowledge is passed on in an
oral tradition. Teleconferences are held on "bridges" - illicit phone links;
technical information is exchanged on private computer bulletin-board systems
run out of hackers' bedrooms; samizdat magazines are distributed with names
like "Phrack" and "2600." The latter name is an homage to Captain Crunch's
2,600-hertz tone, a tacit recognition that this oral tradition stretches back
decades.
"Even though hippies were blue-boxing for all it was worth in the
Sixties," explains Ikon, born the year Captain Crunch went to jail, "they
didn't really understand what they were doing. In the Nineties, we're on a
search for technical knowledge; what WE'RE doing is figuring out how the phone
system really WORKS."
Once you understand the architecture of the system, all sorts of
opportunities present themselves. Consider those telephone hybrids found
beside most automatic-teller machines - the ones that connect you immediately
with a bank employee. We see a way of getting help; a hacker sees unlimited
free long-distance phone calls. Here's how:
When you pick up that phone, you hear a moment of silence before the
automatic dialer beeps out the seven tones that call the bank's service center.
That silence represents an open phone line, waiting to be told what to do.
So instead of waiting for the automatic dialer, click the phone's hook ten
times in rapid succession. This action perfectly imitates the ten spluttering
pulses of the last hole on the rotary dial - the operator. When the seven
tones sound, they are ignored; you've already seized control of the phone line.
Wait a moment and the operator will answer. Explain that you're having trouble
reaching a certain number in the Gobi Desert; could she dial it for you? Piece
of cake.
Yet if technology giveth, it also taketh away. One hot Friday night in July,
we get the call to pick up the boys at Penn Station. They are bringing along
some friends and a full agenda. Tonight, we're informed, will hold many
lessons for us. When we meet, Ikon gravely explains the situation: "We seem to
have lost our resources." It appears that NYNEX is starting to change
passwords on them, and the one dialup into NPSN that was still working is now
disabled. It just rings and rings. We will now be starting practically from
scratch.
We walk east on Thirty-fourth Street toward the Empire State Building.
We've already hacked from two New York landmarks; why not a third? At 7:00,
the building is pretty empty. Tourists are either taking the escalator down to
to Guinness World of Records Exhibition or the elevator up to the Observation
Deck. We're roaming the halls, scoping out pay-phone banks, and feeling rather
conspicuous - six young men with a big black suitcase. A security guard,
trying to be helpful, spooks us, and all six of us bolt simultaneously for six
pay phones, pretending to be in midconversation. A ludicrous paranoia is
setting in.
Eventually we find a velvet rope draped across a corridor, guarded only by
a man polishing the floor. A few furtive glances down the hall, and we're over
and in, ensconced in a secluded phone bank. We unpack our laptop, our modem,
and our acoustic coupler; happily, the entire contraption fits on the phone's
shelf.
Ikon starts pounding digits on the pay phone, trying to get that one
dialup to work. But there is only continuous ringing. Suddenly he gets an
idea. It's a long shot - a solution hopelessly simple. He calls the actual
office whose computer he's trying to break into and politely asks the woman to
(please) turn on the computer's modem.
Ecstasy.
"We're back on!"
"Yo! We're worth something!"
"It's MIZAR! It's everything!"
"We have a reason to live!"
With access to NPSN, we now set out to "liberate" one of these pay phones,
that is, to free it from its addiction to quarters. We get into the switching
computer for this neighborhood and disconnect the pay phone. "The beast," Ikon
declares, "is dead. We have killed it." Picking up the beast's receiver
proves that he's right; no dial tone. "Now we bring the beast back to life,"
Ikon announces, and resurrects it as a regular phone, able to make local and
long-distance calls for free.
Kool takes out his black marker and writes on the pay phone in the wild
style of graffiti artists: "The PLO Lives," and then adds, "Payphone Liberation
Organization." We reconnect the computer to the liberated phone.
A second security guard happens along. He has a distinct interest in
being told just what the - just what in HELL is going on around here, anyway?
Kool takes him aside for a bit of impromptu social engineering. "We're, uh,
sending a story over the phones. We're with NBC." The guard notices the
peacock logo on Ikon's white NBC baseball cap (NBC Studios gift shop, $10) and
somehow makes sense of this - a bunch of teenagers, the middle of the night,
Cheez Doodles, Jolt Cola; of COURSE they're TV reporters. Now he wants to chat
US up.
"What's the story on?" he asks eagerly.
"It's on the pay phones at the Empire State Building," replies Kool. "You
know, uh, what kind of problems they have..." Kools improvisation is getting
almost comically desperate, but the guard still buys it. After a moment, he
moves on to complete his rounds.
From our current perch in NPSN, we want to hop onto the Brooklyn COSMOS
maintenance system. The password we've using no longer works; they've changed
the locks. This is a serious problem. Social engineering at this level is
extremely difficult, because the operators have been burned too many times to
just hand over a password. What's more, there is no direct phone number to
COSMOS, dialup; COSMOS can only be reached from NPSN. But there is, as always,
another way. This time it's called "pad-to-pad," probably the most advanced
hacking procedure, because it calls for an artful use of both mechanical and
social-engineering talents. Here's how it works:
Call an office in Brooklyn where you know they use COSMOS. Tell the
person who answers that you're troubleshooting her COSMOS account, and you need
her help. Ask her to type STAT on her keyboard and read off the number that
appears. With it, you can connect directly to her computer terminal; now YOUR
screen is HER screen. Everything she types you can read, and vice versa.
Begin the social engineering: Ask her to sign on to COSMOS and enter her
password. She thinks everything is fine because she isn't telling you anything
over the telephone, and she isn't, exactly; she's just typing on her terminal.
And you type on yours, faking the computer's commands. When she types in her
account number, you respond - as the computer would - by typing "Password?" Of
course, her password won't get her onto COSMOS, since she's connected only to
your computer; instead, it appears in glowing letters on your screen. You type
"login incorrect." Before she tries again, detach your terminal from hers and
keep talking, offering friendly advice.
At the Empire State Building, standing at a pay phone, our first shot at
pad-to-pad works perfectly. Our victim puzzles over why the system won't grant
her access and tries again. In a flash she hears the familiar clicks and
squeaks that assure her she is safely on, and she and Ikon exchange cheerful
banter as the COSMOS warning flashes on her screen:
ATTENTION ALL USERS
Under no circumstances should you disclose your logon password to anyone
on the phone or in person.
Ikon strings her along for another few minutes, listening to her complaints,
completing the lie: "Well, it seemed to be okay from this end. The first time
it said `login incorrect,' huh? You think you might have typed it in wrong?
But he's barely listening now, performing the coda by rote, because he's
already connected to the Brooklyn COSMOS with her account, and he's exploring,
looking for a backdoor program he installed here the last time he was on,
before they moved the mainframe from Brooklyn to Massachusetts.
"It's here!" Ikon shouts.
"They're so stupid, man," says Kool.
"When they copied all the commands they copied our backdoor command over
too," Ikon explains.
We execute this old command, disappear through the "back door," and
surface on a higher, more powerful level of the machine. For the next few
hours, we explore this strange new land, trying to figure out the look of the
place. We are a dozen hands groping in the darkness, feeling our way along the
wall of a system somewhere in Massachusetts. While one hacker works the
keyboard, the others throw out suggestions. Over time, ideas are winnowed,
attempts are assayed. Failures are common, but they are relieved by moments of
hope. A small obstacle is surmounted or a new passageway is discovered. The
fun of gaining entry is over; now most of the hacking is trial and error,
banging away at an obstacle until a path over, around, or through is revealed.
At this remove - we are relayed off three computers and extended across four
states - even the easiest of hacking problems can suddenly become complex
again.
We, the reporters, try to buoy our own interest by peppering the hackers
with questions. But after a while, the answers are numbingly similar: "We're
trying to get in." "We're just looking around." "We're trying to figure out
what this does." After three hours, we are slumped against a wall,
contemplating the significance of our boredom. At times, accompanying hackers
is about as exciting as watching a graduate student flip through a card
catalogue. During the fourth hour, several of the hackers grow restless. One
leaves, another calls some friends. Kool slides down the wall to join us, and
wistfully recalls the old days, when he could hack for twelve hours without a
break.
Ikon outlasts everyone, which is not unusual. He's deep within the
machine now, wired, intense, alert. He waves off the occasional call for food,
ignoring his own hunger and fatigue. He's been standing before this unit for
five hours without rest; he barely bothers to shift his weight from one leg to
another. All we hear are the occasional staccato clicks as he attempts yet
another entry. From time to time a security guard approaches and peers in.
Our paranoia has yielded to exhaustion. We wave.
Ikon's reverie doesn't end until the battery pack on the laptop dies. Everyone
else is relieved; we've been ready to go for hours.
As we pack up our equipment and head out into the night, Kool's attention
is suddenly distracted by a low-slung, high-tech car. "Yo, check out that
Porsche with the cellular phone. I'd give up hacking for that car."
"Who needs a Porsche?" asks Ikon. "We have MIZAR."
Kool looks at him with amazement, but Ikon goes on. "I'd rather have all
of NYNEX than a Porsche. I mean, can you get passwords with a Porsche?"
Kool, still dumbfounded, states the obvious: "You can get GIRLS with a
Porsche! Can you get girls with a password?"
They're laughing, but we all know it's true: For Ikon, there is no higher
purpose than hacking NYNEX. Kool, on the other hand, is willing to make a few
exceptions.
As they discuss the next day's hacking agenda, Kool admits that he's
getting a little bored with the endless exploration, and suggests that they try
some COOL stuff. "Maybe we could forward calls to a radio station and be the
only ones who can get through," he suggests. "We could win tickets to, like, a
Depeche Mode concert."
Ikon is dismissive. "No. The Project."
"C'mon, let's think of something to DO."
"No, wait. The Project, the Project." He is insistent: We will continue
to chart the landscape of the telephone company. Nothing else matters.
We're with Kool, frankly: When do we get to start changing the orbit of
satellites and listening in on Madonna's phone calls? For that matter, when do
we conquer the entire NYNEX system? When does it end?
"The thing that keeps us so interested," Ikon tells us later, "is that
with NYNEX, or any other system with good security, we'll NEVER have permanent
access. We'll always lose what we need, and we'll be forced to find another
way to get back into it. It's almost like a game. It's like a never-ending
role-playing adventure game, but it's real. The thing that makes it interesting
is that you can never win."
"So why play?" we ask. "Why spend years at a keyboard, risking jail, to
play a game you'll never win?"
"It's like having the edge. That's the whole thing," says Ikon. "The
name of the game is having the edge."
"Over whom?" we ask.
"Over anyone else," he replies. "Some people spend their whole lifetime
trying to find the one thing that they're really good at. We've found it
already. We're hackers. You know, there are always these computer
know-it-alls who say, `Oh yeah, I used to be a hacker.' That's crap. If
you're an ex-hacker, you were never a hacker to begin with. It's not something
that dies. It's a way of life. It's a way of thinking."
What's the purpose of all this exploration? After a dozen nights, it hits
us: Hacking HAS no practical purpose. Every hacker starts as a utilitarian,
viewing the phone systems as a means to an end, such as free calls or high-tech
pranking. But over time the means BECOME the end. Advanced hackers are
nothing more than aestheticians; they marvel not at the system's use but at the
system itself. Suddenly a nagging contradiction makes sense. Throughout our
apprenticeship, the hackers consistently scorned our "juvenile" requests to
hack into TRW. Now we understand why. The best hackers are BORED by TRW (and
other record-keeping systems, like those at hospitals and schools) despite the
juicy information they contain. These computers are simple data-retrieval
units, not much more complicated than the word processor used to write this
article. The TRW computer isn't worth hacking, because, as Kool so sweetly
puts it, "it's a piece of shit." The phone networks ARE worth hacking, not
because of what a hacker can use them for, but because of their vast size. "It
goes back to what Crunch said," Ikon explains. "The phone system is the
largest network in the entire world." It's the hardest thing to hack, and
therefore, it's the only thing WORTH hacking. It is from these hackers that
the law and the corporations have the least to fear. Ironically, these are the
ones getting busted.
It is true that everything Kool and Ikon do when hacking is illegal. All
their calls are paid for fraudulently; all the systems they enter are
proprietary. This fact occasionally provides a frisson of excitement (probably
more so for us, the amateurs, than for serious hackers); more frequently, it is
just ignored. What these hackers are doing makes absolute sense to them: They
are gaining knowledge. If there are laws against that, they reason, they're
not worth taking seriously. They've probably never heard Bob Dylan's code for
the outlaw - "to live outside the law, you must be honest" - but they
instinctively follow it.
If pressed, they will describe the havoc they could unleash on the phone
system; they could easily write a simple virus that would disable switch after
switch, shutting down phone service for all of New York and New England in a
few hours. The damage, they estimate, could take NYNEX engineers months to
repair. "We could handle it," says Ikon flatly. But asking them what sort of
harm they could do to the phone system is like asking a surgeon what sort of
harm he could do to a patient he's operating on. They could destroy it...but
what kind of question is that?
A couple of weeks after the night at the Empire State Building, we're sitting
with four hackers in the appropriately named Cosmos Diner, watching four rail-
thin adolescents attack four huge plates of meat. We ask them what had become
an obvious question: What if the phone company actually offered them jobs?
"If NYNEX offered me a good job in an intelligent position, I'd take it in
a second. I wouldn't even think about it," replies Ikon.
"I called," Kool says. "They said all they had was repair, installation,
and outside plant."
"Doofus stuff," explains Ikon. "All they have is dickhead jobs."
We ask how many people in the phone company know as much about the systems
as they do.
"To tell you the truth," says Ikon, "I don't think there are ANY. I'll
tell you why. Each person in NYNEX specializes in a single network, or just
part of a network. We, on the other hand, could easily assume the position of
any person in any department for any reason."
"What would happen if they did hire you, and they said, `Okay, you're in
charge of stopping Hackers'?"
"There's a problem with that," Ikon explains. "There was this Legion of
Doom member from Michigan who was busted last year for something minor. They
gave him a job in some bogus department within Michigan Bell security. They'd
get him to try to engineer departments, or try to guess passwords and get into
systems. And then they canceled the project."
"Would you do a project like that if they asked you?"
"Yeah!" replies Kool. "That would be my perfect position."
"And you could make NYNEX secure?"
"Sure," says Ikon. "I could do it in a minute. We know every single
aspect of how to get into these systems. I could tell them in a minute how
to -" He stops himself. "But the thing is, it wouldn't be worth it. They
would hire us, they'd get a few secrets and tips from us, and then they'd fire
us. That's what they did to the guy in Michigan. They found out exactly what
he could do, and then they fired him."
"If we were offered a real opportunity to help," Ikon continues, "then we
would help. But they'll never do that. They would never admit that they could
be helped by people half their age. They just have too much pride."
"When I called up NYNEX to ask for a job," says Kool, "I talked to this
guy in Corporate Security. This guy didn't know shit about his network. I
told him all these secrets, ways to break in; all they did was block all those
entry points. I have yet to hear from anybody offering me a job."
"And later the same day, at home, we got back into the network through
another entrance," says Ikon. "There's always another way."
"So fuck them," concludes Kool.
Over the last ten years, this country's relationship with technology has
changed profoundly, in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Ten
years ago, when we wanted to send a letter across town, we'd need a stamp and
a few days to spare. Now we fax it in seconds. When we wanted money, we'd
have to go cash a check with a real live bank teller. Now we don't even know
when our banks are open. Personal computers, long-distance calling cards - we
who have them can't imagine life without them.
During the same period, the many systems that we depend on - phone
networks, banking transfers, even our national-security apparatus - have become
increasingly dependent on computers. We trust these machines, sometimes
unwittingly, with enormous amounts of personal information. This rarely
concerns us; we have developed an almost religious faith in computers and in
the people who run them. When we think of these systems at all, we trust that
they are safe.
We are wrong.
Every one of these technological advances has made us less secure. Now
our phones can be disabled; our credit histories can be changed; our medical
profiles can be stolen; our social security information can be accessed. And
it can all be done by an untraceable teenager at a pay phone, thousands of
miles away.
There are no alarms being sounded by the people who run these systems.
NYNEX, in fact, refused to allow any of its security personnel to be
interviewed for this article. If computer-security professionals were to admit
that the systems they manage are vulnerable, they would be asked how they could
be made invulnerable. And at that point, they would have to admit that the
systems cannot be, can never be.
Much of the public debate over computer hackers involves a search for the
right metaphor. Are hackers simple trespassers, gliding through our houses
without harming the contents? Are they armed robbers, breaking and entering?
Are our computer systems like our homes, locked and protected? Or are they
just a huge open field with a tiny sign saying KEEP OFF THE GRASS?
From a distance, a computer network looks like a fortress - impregnable,
heavily guarded. As you get closer, though, the walls of the fortress look a
little flimsy. You notice that the fortress has a thousand doors; that some
are unguarded, the rest watched by unwary civilians.
All the hacker has to do to get in is find an unguarded door, or borrow a
key, or punch a hole in the wall. The question of whether he's allowed is made
moot by the fact that it's unbelievable simple to enter.
Breaking into computer systems will always remain easy because the systems
have to accommodate dolts like you and me. If computers were used only by
brilliant programmers, no doubt they could maintain a nearly impenetrable
security system. But computers aren't built that way; they are "dumbed down"
to allow those who must use them to do their jobs. So hackers will always be
able to find a trusting soul to reveal a dialup, an account, and a password.
And they will always get in.
It is gradually dawning on us, thanks mostly to the exploits of hackers,
that we have much less control over the computers that run our information
society than we did over, say, file cabinets. Our general reaction has been to
blame the messengers. In fact, to try to imprison them. Although they have
never harmed the systems they hack. Kool and Ikon will probably be indicted
early next year for a variety of acts made illegal by the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act of 1986; the charges they face carry maximum sentences of many
decades in prison. But even if hackers are jailed, hacking won't be
eliminated; it's just too human an instinct, and just too easy a practice.
Toward the end of the summer, we decide to attempt the kind of hack the
government says is the main threat: We will try to hack the White House -
specifically, the PROF system installed in 1982 by Admiral John Poindexter,
then President Reagan's national security adviser. Poindexter chose PROF in an
attempt to ELIMINATE security breaches. If any system is unhackable, we
reason, this is the one.
By the time we finally get together, however, a week after we first
discuss PROF with the hackers, we learn that one of them has already called the
White House computer center. He laid on the usual line about doing work on the
system, and he got a dialup. The more difficult task, still ahead, is
obtaining an account and a password.
We are sitting, as always, around a phone, safe in what one hacker
describes as "a covert, undisclosed location somewhere in the tri-state area."
He thumbs through a Federal Yellow Book, the publicly available directory for
the executive branch of the U.S. government. "Why don't I call one of these
people?" he suggests, pointing to the page headed, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE
PRESIDENT. He scans down the page - the staffs of Fitzwater, Sununu,
Scowcroft - and decides randomly on a target a few doors down from the
President.
"I'll just talk to him really basic," he explains, dialing the target's
direct number. "I need a name to use." As the phone rings in the White House,
he glances around the room and his eyes settle on a T-shirt, signed just above
the pocket by the French designer Fran?ois Girbaud.
The White House answers. The hacker's voice drops an octave.
Hacker: Yeah, how're you doin'? This is Fran?ois Girbaud with the
computer operations division.
White House: Mmm-hmm.
H: Yeah, I was just wondering if you had any access to the PROF system.
WH: Yeah, I do. I don't use it very often, though.
H: Yeah, I know. Cause we're, like, troubleshooting your account.
WH: Oh.
H: It seems that something's wrong with it. And, you know, we're
wondering if maybe it's, like, one of the dialups that you're using to get
in or something.
WH: Well, let me see. Hold on, I'm just getting out of what I was doing.
H: You know, if you're too busy I could call back later.
WH: No, that's okay, this is fine. Hold on one minute, I'm just saving
what I was working on. Okay. [He logs into PROF too fast for the hacker
to get his account.]
H: Wait, wait. Why don't you go back a little? We have to verify the
account as you're typing it in.
WH: Oh, I'm sorry.
H: Yeah, we want to make sure that it's your account and not somebody
else's.
WH: How do I get out of this?
H: Ah, don't worry about it. Just repeat your account. Just tell me the
account you're using currently.
WH: Oh, I'm sorry. [And he reads off seven characters.]
H: [trying to decide his next move] Umm, okay...[but his next move is
made for him]
WH: And do you need my password too?
H: Um, yeah, sure. That would be good.
With an account and a password secured, the hacker politely concludes the
conversation, hangs up the telephone, and bursts into laughter: "Yo, man,
FRANCOIS GIRBAUD! I just read the name off his shirt! It's like saying
`Levi's!' I shoulda said `Calvin Klein.'" Another hacker joins in: "Or Dick
Hertz!" And another: "Or Mike Hunt!" For the rest of the evening, Fran?ois
Girbaud is the punch line to every joke. No other hack could top this one, so
we head out to McDonald's for burgers and Cokes - just a bunch of teenagers,
hanging on a Friday night. Maybe tomorrow we will read George Bush's mail.